World From Rough Stones

by Malcolm Macdonald

  Walter was the most attentive of husbands. His greatest delights lay in such simple things—walking with her when the evenings grew light and the days were mild, turning the page for her as she played their new pianoforte, joining her in duets (even though his ear did not always match his gusto), and reading to her from Nicholas Nickleby and Jorrocks and the verses of Wordsworth, who, Walter considered, was supreme among poets. It was precisely the sort of life she had envisaged for them during the long years of their engagement.

  She even managed a tolerant, superior sort of contentment that was almost a happiness when Walter exercised his rights on her. He was so considerate and thoughtful nowadays. He never tried to get her to join his delight, as he had in those early, dreadful, weeks. And she, thanks to that gentle consideration of his, had come to realize how different men were from women—especially in their degree of endowment with animal nature. One had to remember it was the same animal nature that led them to explore distant lands, to make great poetry and music, and to build fine cities—and fine tunnels. She would be almost flying in the face of God to deny it a due place in the home, which, after all, was source of all civilization and its arts and achievements. Thus, as a mother may lovingly comfort or encourage a child possessed of a rage or an enthusiasm she herself is years past sharing— feeling for the child rather than with it—so Arabella learned to comfort and encourage Walter when that particular spirit had seized him, though herself was far above sharing it.

  And when Walter was away, at Summit or in Manchester, there was always their new home and its cares to absorb her. Little Horsfall, who, just after Christmas, had gone through a spell of surly and grudging obedience so bad that Arabella was on the point of dismissing her, suddenly turned into a model servant. Mrs. Bates said it was because the girl had taken to the Unitarians, who, under the patronage of the Fieldens, were strong in Todmorden. Sweeney said it was just growing up and that her good behaviour meant as little as her bad, except that it made her easier to live with. Arabella took it as a caution against the harsh and precipitate judgement of others; to have dismissed Horsfall without any positive attempt to rescue and reform her wayward spirit would have been very wrong.

  Each week that passed brought problems of this kind. No doubt they were all very trivial compared with those that Walter faced every day at Summit, but they were, for all that, important. The harmony of this little female community and its master, their physical wellbeing, and their spiritual care—these were not minor responsibilities. And Arabella was not one to make them appear so. Often she would think of John Stevenson's ridiculous expectations for her—how he saw her as some kind of missionary, moving among his navvies and doling out Example as if it were a kind of nourishing broth. Such a man could only think in those grandiose terms. She could never have made him see the importance of her little work at Pex Hill.

  Sometimes when Nora called, they would talk and laugh about it together. And Nora's amusement at the very idea of Missionary Arabella, far from making her feel insulted, merely confirmed that hers was a still, small light whose radiance was just sufficient to illumine this one little household.

  Nora would carry this amusement home to Rough Stones.

  "I fancy yon Arabella has at last begun to take your opinions of her to heart," she said once to John.

  He showed a wary interest.

  "She's bought a new china dog and is now undergoing agonies of spirit as to whether it should stand near the paper silhouettes or the stuffed lark or have a new shelf all its own above the chiming clock that shows the moon. She'll be in agonies about it all this week, you'll see. It must take a great soul to accommodate such long-tormenting doubts!"

  In time, John learned not to answer these jibes and not to repeat his certainty that there was more fibre in Arabella than met anybody else's eye.

  Arabella's pleasure with their life at Pex Hill was especially delightful to Walter. Often as he sang with her…listening to her soft, appealing soprano… watching the light reflecting off the music and delicately suffusing her face with pale radiance whenever he turned a page…he thought back with amusement to the early weeks of their marriage.

  But his amusement masked a more complex emotion, something between anger and shame. How could he ever have imagined that this purely spiritual love could accommodate itself to the gratification of mere animal lust? A love that found expression in such pure joys as walking together, singing together, reading poetry together…how could such a love bend itself to those base, cloacal urges! Even his fantasies about dead girls now made him cringe with shame. These days what he did with Arabella could scarcely be called carnal at all; it was so void of lust, of fantasy, of any dominance or assertion of power, that only the literal mind would connect it in any way with fleshly gratification. Except, of course, at the very pinnacle of its climax; that could hardly be avoided, for it was then that body, mind, spirit, urge, need, and passion all united. But that was the only moment when such unity was proper—in the highest, purest kind of love.

  He remembered the analogies he had once used in order to persuade her that pure and carnal love could unite in a marriage: that love was a tissue irrigated by three arteries—pinch one off and part must wither, spreading its gangrene to the whole. Now, when he saw things in such a clearer light, it amazed him that an analogy—a metaphor, really—drawn so exclusively from organic nature could ever have seemed convincing. Especially to a modern engineer. It was so old-fashioned—like one of those witty, implausible arguments that seventeenthcentury poets loved to elaborate.

  Indeed, the more he thought about engineering and natural science, the more excitingly clear it became that they offered the only true metaphor of life, far truer than old-fashioned arguments drawn from natural history. Probably the first true vision of man and nature and life and society and behaviour and that sort of thing in the whole of history. A new order was emerging, positive, clear, and rational—built on the certainties of physical science and the achievements of engineering. Together these two structures were reshaping the minds of those who lived and laboured among them. A new understanding of mechanism was opening up—not in the vague way the philosophers one had read at school bandied such terms about, but in engineer's language, which dealt in measurement, prediction, and control.

  It was now clear to him that the leading spirits of mankind had scaled upward to a new level of awareness—one in which metaphors of life taken from nature no longer satisfied the truly modern intellect; one in which natural science alone could mark the way forward. True, they still had far to go. The metaphors of science and the explanations they offered of life and society were at present like two out-offocus images in a binocular surveying telescope. However, he firmly anticipated the day when they would not only resolve into perfect clarity but fit, one upon the other, in total accord. He hoped still to be alive in such momentous times.

  He had come to these notions in the most casual way—during the many hours he had spent in examining his own passions and their at times ungovernable force. It was always the word "force" that triggered these thoughts. Arabella's father (who had proved so right, though for all the wrong reasons) had spoken of "vital force" and "conserving the force of manhood" or some such phrase. Always force.

  By the most enlightening coincidence, force was a word daily on the lips of any engineer who had the remotest connection with steam power. Twenty or thirty years earlier, such power had been delivered to the cylinder at pressures measured in mere tens of pounds to the square inch. Now, in the most advanced engines, the pressures were nudging the hundred-pound mark and the talk was all of greater and greater force.

  To engineers, it was now clear that no single cylinder could take steam at such pressures and extract all its energy at one stroke. Engines of the future would all have to be "compound"—that is, they would have a high-pressure cylinder to take the peak of the force out of the steam, which would then pass to a different, low-pressure cylinder where the rest of its force c
ould be usefully extracted and put to work. Any other system would be wasteful, inefficient, and—worst of all to an engineer worth his salt—unharmonious.

  The journals Walter read and the discussions he had with colleagues were bound at some point to touch on this coming generation of engines. It took little intellectual effort to realize that these ideas offered a most exact parallel to the proper regulation of the lustful force which so possessed him at times. No single outlet could exhaust all its energy; it, too, needed its high and its low vessels. Even his most assiduous devotion to Arabella absorbed only the high element. He had proved as much when, in a bout of induced spiritual zeal, he foreswore the low element and within days began to show all the symptoms Arabella's father had promised would accompany its indulgence "simple irritability, backache, headache, nervousness, and lassitude." A quick trip to Manchester and fifteen minutes of jigging on the old fork every so often was enough to prevent a recurrence of that.

  But the haphazard nature of these forays and their lack of any predictable or regular core left him at heart dissatisfied. They smacked of mere self-indulgence. He wished he were a man of leisure who had all the time in the world to examine and experiment with these fascinating new ideas. But he lived a catchas-catch-can sort of life and must seize what opportunities it thrust upon him.

  Then Arabella's pregnancy was confirmed; and her lapse into near-paralysis gave him all the time needed to endow his low force with the harmony and order that its high level had long possessed.

  Although it was mere chance that took him down Cannon Street that particular day in early July, and although he could in no sense claim to have planned all that he and young Nelly and Sophie did with one another in the weeks that followed, yet there was a level within him at which he had long prepared for just such an encounter. (And that—incidentally—was why John Stevenson was wrong to see it as no more than a further expression of Walter's eternal obsessions. The men at Summit, who nudged one another and winked as they said, "fallen in love 'as Gaffer Thornton," were closer to the truth.)

  These two girls were dressed in such elegant silks that Walter, strolling and daydreaming behind them up Cannon Street, had taken them for two young ladies—until he noticed how coarse were the dark-haired girl's hands. Then he saw that they were strolling slower and slower; he, naturally, kept pace behind them. The dark-haired girl stopped and twisted around, bringing her body in profile and her face three-quarters to him. She fixed him with her great, melting gaze and smiled beautifully. His pulse began to race at once. What a figure she had! A delicate little head with large features—large, dark eyes, large cheek bones, and a large mouth with full lips—and a delicate little body, also with… large features.

  He smiled.

  Her friend had gone a few paces on and taken the first of three steps up into one of the houses before she, too, turned and smiled at Walter, rather shyly. The first impression she made was far less striking. She was petite and quiet, with auburn hair, and she had a way of dropping her eyes to the ground and smiling as if about to apologize for something.

  He looked back at her more brazen friend. "Well," he said coming close to her. "It's a fine day for peeling a banana."

  Her smile broadened into a grin. "Or to take a turn around Bushey Park."

  The sweat began to start from him; anxiously he wiped his palms upon his hips. "What do they charge by way of entrance at that park?"

  The girl looked at her friend to include her. "A dollar each," she said. "To help the poor scholars. A dollar for each scholar."

  He was fairly twitching now to be at her. "Do they study hard?" he asked. "Your scholars."

  "Only to please," the girl assured him.

  "I'd like to see their school," he said, already walking toward the house. The auburn one had opened the door and peeped inside while the other two were talking; now, she turned back and gestured that the way was clear and that no potentially embarrassing encounters would follow.

  There was an extra excitement for Walter as he followed them upstairs because, apart from one drunken adventure when he had been an apprentice—and had been too drunk to take advantage of it—he had never before taken horizontal refreshment with two girls together. He was glad their room was on the top floor, too. There was something romantic about being as high above the street as possible, beneath the sloping walls, with the windows open and spilling in the evening sunlight and the breeze, invisible to the world, safe from prying eyes and from passers-by upon the stair; you could forget all the other rooms in the house and their depressing reminder that the unique joys you here created were being repeated there and there and there and there…in endless cliché.

  When they started the final part of their ascent, out of sight of the rest of the house, the auburn one ran ahead to open the door. But the dark-haired one, immediately in front of Walter, slowed to almost a halt and began delicately to lift her skirt and petticoats upward about her waist. Walter followed, mesmerized, caressing gently with his hands the smooth white flesh of calves and thighs as each was laid bare. At the top she halted and stretched back one limb at him, like a cat. "Oooh Charlie!" she murmured.

  "Walter," he corrected. He always liked them to call him by his proper name. "And you?"

  "Sophie," she said. "And she's Nelly."

  Nelly held the door open to them; her other hand clutched a tin cash box, which she unlocked as soon as the door was shut. Sophie was already running eager fingers over Walter while Nelly demurely asked for their money. "So soon?" he joked.

  "While the gleam is in the eye," Nelly said simply.

  She locked his half-sovereign in the box and put it back in the drawer. And when she turned and took off her bonnet and let her hair fall it was a signal for the most astonishingly voluptuous adventure in sensual exultation he had ever undergone.

  After six more visits, which took a mere week to consume, he no longer separated the details of this or that session in his memory; they all dissolved into one thrilling riot of their jubilant flesh. He did not ask where his energies derived or how he managed a double performance, day after day; he was besotted with their skills. Even on the train back home, exhausted beyond any new feat that day, the memory of their youth, their liveliness, the soft curves of their young bodies, their invention, their utter willingness…all would overwhelm him to the point of desperation, so that he would even—for a moment—seriously contemplate taking the same train on its return to town and enjoy them all over again.

  He understood well enough what had happened to him: He had found the predictable and regular element which his lower life had never yet possessed. Being already head-over-halo in love with Arabella he had now, so to speak, fallen arse-over-tit for Nelly and Sophie. They began to haunt his working day, so that anything—the forked wrinkles of skin by a person's eye, a cow's udder, the maid's arm at breakfast, pale knuckles…anything—would call them to mind and set him trembling.

  For a time, he wondered why he needed two of them; until he realized that the presence of both girls and, in mechanical terms, the choice they constantly offered him, helped reduce the taint of humanity, of individuality, and of all those distractions that belonged to the higher vessel. Thus, together, they offered no challenge to the neat ordering of his vital forces and their efficient, energizing progress from high to low. Either Nelly or Sophie on her own might, during the frenzy of his rut, become a person; as long as he always had both available, there was no danger of that.

  When that frenzy was over, of course, there was no harm in exploring their humanity; he was by nature far too confirmed an opportunist to take any notion, least of all his own, to fanatical extremes. So, when the beast was off his back, they would often lie side by side in the balmy summer breeze, temporarily chaste, and talk of life and dreams. He learned that they were both country girls from one of the villages up beyond Preston. They had been caught, when they were both sixteen, "taking on a bit of beef without a licence," as they put it, and had been shamed out—
indeed driven out when it was found they were both pregnant. They had been advised to go to a certain dressmaker in Preston who had aborted them and sent them on to a dressmaker in Manchester who was letting rooms to quiet gay ladies. She had set them up in this room, which they had, together with another on the floor below, and the use of two dresses for four pounds a week. And here they had been ever since.

  The differences he had noted between Nelly and Sophie, almost at first sight, had not been contradicted. Nelly remained demure and somehow shy; even in her most lascivious and most abandoned excesses there still remained a core of gentleness and, though it seemed on the face of it an odd word to use, modesty. Her speech was never coarse. She would talk of "your thing" and "my place" and would ask him to "put it in." Sophie had no such inhibitions. Her language was as coarse as her hands.